NEW YORK CITY: The Lucille Lortel Theatre announced the recipients of the fifth annual NYC Public High School Playwriting Fellowship. Fellows each represent a New York City borough. Winning playwrights include Kelsey Cruz of Belmont Preparatory High School in the Bronx; Kenny Iñiguez of Manhattan Bridges High School; Jordan Jenkins of Brooklyn High School of the Arts; Yan Bo Lin of Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts in Queens; Autumn Phillips of Curtis High School in Staten Island; and Vanessa Wu of Pathways to Graduation in Brooklyn.
Each fellow will receive a $500 honorarium and will have their plays presented on March 25 at Rattlestick Theater. Kimille Howard will direct all the presentations. The young artists have been working with mentor Nilan, a performer and arts leader, since January to develop their works.
NEW YORK CITY: The Latinx Playwrights Circle (LPC) has named playwrights David Davila, Antonia Bess Cruz-Kent, Vanessa Pereda, and SMJ the members of this year’s Intensive Mentorship program. Each playwright will be partnered with a mentor to develop a full-length play. They will also receive a stipend and will be able to enroll in classes at Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts. Public staged readings of the mentees’ new works will be held in the fall.
The new plays include The Invisible Hand of God Touched Me in a Bad Place, a power play by Davila, a multi-hyphenate artist from South Texas; Ivera by recent Columbia University MFA Playwriting graduate Cruz-Kent; Fresno’s Fire + Flood are in the pool again by indigenous queer Chicana artist Pereda; and Yo Ho! by SMJ, a New York-based nonbinary Latine playwright and musical theatre writer.
NEW HOPE, PA.: Bucks County Playhouse has announced the lineup for their inaugural South Asian Artistic Initiative Playwriting Festival. Readings will be held May 10-11 at Lambertville Hall.
The first reading will be Muslim in the Midst (May 10) by Anand Rao. The play follows a chance encounter between two couples in India after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and will be directed by Vinita Belani.
The next reading will be Nikhil Mahapatra’s American Hunger (May 11), which follows two restaurants vying for dominance in gentrifying Crown Heights. Rajiv Joseph will direct.
The final reading will be Ravi Kapoor’s Tea for Toofi (May 11), an adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe set in 1980s Orange County, Calif. Kiran Merchant will direct.
WASHINGTON, D.C.: The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has named Phanésia Pharel the recipient of this year’s Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award for her play Waterfall. Pharel conceived Waterfall during a fellowship with Thrown Stone Theatre Company and workshopped it with the Old Globe. Waterfall focuses on a mother-daughter bond in the Haitian American community.
The Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award recognizes outstanding plays that express the African American experience. Pharel will receive an honorarium of $1,000 and will be invited to the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival for professional development.
